Population Displacements: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

While the international community is frantically engaged in developing more credible terror policies against refugees and immigrants and is feverishly occupied with the politics of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, over thirty million internally displaced people endure persecutions and remain caged in turbulent and inhumane conditions in their home countries. Some fifteen million externally displaced persons or refugees also languish outside their home countries without basic human rights and human security. These victims of violations of human rights and political violence are uprooted from their homes by a number of interrelated factors, internal and external, past and present. Historically, mass displacements of populations have been intimately linked with violently contested legitimacy of the state, its institutions, and their incumbents. Legitimacy of the state demands that the construction and/or the preservation of the political entity reflect the vital interests, values, and expectations of its members. Human rights, including the rights to development, human security, and social justice, are central to the political legitimacy of the state and its institutions. When a state meets these criteria, its members, in turn, will identify and co-operate with it and its institutions. Such a state, whose sovereignty is derived from its members, is also likely to conform to international norms, customs, principles, conventions, and obligations by which relations between states and international persons are governed. States that are major sources of contemporary displacements of populations, however, suffer from a profound and chronic legitimation deficit. The origins of this pervasive and harrowing crisis of legitimacy reflect how these predatory juridical states were constructed and preserved. In Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, these states were constructed to meet the vaulting socio-economic, strategic and political interests of imperial powers. Since the primary motives for imperialism did not conform to the interests, values, and expectations of the conquered and dehumanized inhabitants of the colonial creations, the states experienced profound crises of legitimacy. These states also became important sites of violations of human rights and political violence, including terror. The profound legitimation deficit of the state and its incumbents was exacerbated by the imperial violence that accompanied colonial state formations. This violence included herding the target populations into concentration camps, scorched-earth policies, patronage, and manipulation of nationality and/or religious contradictions. Many lives were lost and many inhabitants of the colonial territories were violently uprooted as well. The notoriously arbitrary boundaries of these states intensified the crisis of legitimacy of the faltering colonial states. Paper boundaries, which were imposed on these societies, often cut across national, cultural, linguistic, and economic entities. For example, in the Middle East, the Kurds and the Palestinians were displaced and left stranded in many neighbouring countries. Similarly, in Africa, the Akan, Ewe, Yuruba, Hutu, Tutsi, and Somalis, for example, found themselves in a number of colonial states. The imposed and hostile boundaries, compounded by colonial administrative and economic policies, also left some of the states so small or immense in area or population that they were not viable entities. Although during anti-colonial struggles some local political leaders had criticized the artificial nature of the boundaries, as soon as they assumed power they defended the boundaries. Where national groups demanded self-determination, the new rulers used the same institutions and agents of terror to suppress such demands. The politics of